Skip to main content

On (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

This early Adam Roberts novel, is coincidentally, the third SF book in a row that I've read with teen protagonists. Tighe is a teenage boy (he's described as younger because his civilisation uses 20 month years) in a primitive society, inhabiting a strange world where everyone lives on ledges in a vast wall that appears to be thousands of miles high. Primarily by accident, Tighe gets to experience different cultures on the Worldwall, as well as the terrors of war and some evil, oversized insect life. Eventually we (but not he, because he can't grasp it) get to discover what is really happening. I won't give the game away here (though the cover image gives a hint).

There are strong similarities contextually with Christopher Priest's Inverted World. That novel is also set in a location that seems to depend on strange physics - in the case of Priest's world, one where the Earth appears to have taken on a hyperbolic shape and a city has to be moved all the time to avoid spacetime distortion (though these turn out to be probably perceptual alterations, rather than physical ones). I always found it difficult to get my head around what was happening in Inverted World - in On, the setup was considerably clearer, helped by a scientific appendix (though the fictional bits of the 'science' are rather overdone there). The Worldwall is still sometimes something of a struggle to visualise, but was a lot clearer to me than the inverted world.

The reader gets two things out of Roberts' book - the adventure (and, frankly, the rather miserable existence) side of Tighe's life and the gradual discovery of what has really happened and what the Worldwall is. I felt a little bogged down in the middle war section, but the latter parts really lift the book, even if it ends rather abruptly. The clever use of this strange physical environment, particularly when inhabitants take to the air and odd gravitational effects occur, is truly fascinating.

This isn't the best book Roberts has written by any means - it is an early one - but it illustrates, as his books so often do, an enthusiasm for stretching the science fiction genre and doing things with it that challenge the reader's imagination.

Paperback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...